STAT HOUND MEDIA
CENTRAL WASHINGTON DIGITAL PREP SPORTS
SHANE FULLER/Stat Hound contributor
Fretting over the RPI? It's not what it used to be
Davis' White, others shouldn't wring hands about computer rankings
By JERREL SWENNING/Stat Hound
Feb 7, 2026
Davis girls basketball coach Akil White always seems to be on the move.
If he’s not stomping the sidelines gnawing on a ref’s ear as his Pirates compete, then there’s a good chance the veteran coach is – as he was Tuesday evening in Selah – spending an off-day watching basketball.
White also always seems to be talking basketball. That night’s subject, a favorite of his, was the WIAA’s RPI system to rank teams, two weeks before the brackets are revealed.
The defending Class 4A state champion Pirates, who have lost just once to an in-state opponent in the last two seasons, are ranked No. 1 in by VarsityWA and statewide prep sports reporter Todd Milles.
Yet, because the CBBN behind Davis isn’t terribly strong, Davis sits just fifth in the RPI.
Unfortunately, even with winning the CBBN regular-season and district titles, there’s little the Pirates can do to improve their RPI.
Fortunately, for the junior-heavy team, the rating is far from the end-all-be-all tournament- seeding tool it what when implemented.
“I’ll be honest, we don’t give too much credence to the RPI,” said longtime Yakima Valley and current Sunnyside boys coach Bruce Siebol, who sits on the Class 4A seeding committee.
This is the 10th year of the Ratings Percentage Index. When introduced, it replaced an outdated draw process that could be manipulated for favorable matchups.
Quickly, however, it became clear that a formula that weighs a team’s winning percentage, its
opponent’s winning percentage and its opponent’s opponents winning percentage lacked the nuance needed to be trustworthy.
In the first year of the RPI, 13th-seeded Foss, which played a schedule heavy on Tacoma-area teams in bigger classifications, won the 2017 2A boys tournament in the Yakima Valley SunDome.
Then, 11th-seeded O’Dea won the 3A boys crown in 2019, which King’s followed by capturing the 2020 1A boys title. The Irish played in the rugged Metro and had a strong out-of-state schedule, while the Knights suffered a few losses against bigger schools.
Given the occasional vast gap between seed and result, in the fall of 2020, the WIAA moved away from RPI-based seeding to committees to fill out the brackets, something football had been doing for a couple years.
Siebol has been part of the eight-member 4A boys committee since its inception. Each of Washington’s districts have a representative, with two for District 3 (Tacoma area) and District 6 (Spokane and Tri-Cities) in 4A because of the number of schools.
Instead of crunching numbers like the RPI formula, the committee leans on its members’ experience.
For Siebol that’s a quarter of a century of coaching from B- to 4A-sized schools with more than 300 victories, and being an unabashed hoops junkie – “I just love watching basketball.”
“I’ve probably watched every team in the top 20,” Siebol said. “We watch a lot of film, and there’s a lot of things we watch for.”
That can include players returning from injury or becoming eligible, or a team getting hot – or cold – at the right – or wrong – time.
The committee, Siebol said, communicates nearly every day, and also meets on Zoom.
Members rely on the rankings, whether that’s the WIBCA coaches poll, Milles’ rankings, Associated Press poll (which hasn’t been conducted this year), or Evans Rankins, a computer ranking pulled together by the Tri-Cities’ Matt Evans.
There are still issues for the committees – “One of the difficult things is out-of-state games,” Siebol said – but the seedings have been pretty spot on in the four years since the committees started.
Of the 24 boys champions, 11 have been seeded No. 1 (with five more top seeds earning a spot in the title game), and 10 were No. 2. Sixth-seeded Lynden in 2023 is the lowest to win a championship, and that was second of three straight for the Lions, so hardly a surprise.
Girls championships lean even more to the top seed, with 17 titlists being No. 1 and four more being second-seeded. Two more top seeds advanced to the final, with No. 8 Northwest Christian in 2B last March being the lowest seed.
Besides their domination, the Pirates also can look to the fall when the RPI had five-time defending 1A football champion Royal fourth, and SCAC rival Cashmere – which took the Knights to overtime, nearly snapping the champs’ three-and-a-half-year winning streak.
Royal was seeded No. 1 with Cashmere right behind them. Both rolled to the title game, with the Knights surviving a would-be game-winning two-point attempt by the Bulldogs to win their sixth straight title.
That’s good news for White and his team, which loaded up its nonconference schedule to help offset the drag a weaker conference might produce, and returned Eastern Washington-signee Deets Parrish to the lineup last month.
“I trust someone and their eyeballs,” Siebol said.